No crown, no hands, no problem
By Sam Okafor, London ·
Benoît Mintiens trained as an industrial designer, not a watchmaker, and the Ressence range is what happens when someone from outside the industry asks whether a watch really has to look the way watches look. The answer on the Type 1 is no. There are no hands in the traditional sense. Instead, the dial is a set of rotating discs that orbit one another, each carrying its own marker, so the hours, minutes, seconds and day are read by where each disc has turned to.
It's hard to explain and easy to read once you see one. The whole dial surface moves, slowly, like a planetarium ceiling. The Night Blue colour is deep and even, and the typography is small, clean, sans-serif numerals printed on the discs themselves, so they rotate with the information they belong to.
There's no crown. You wind and set it through a lever on the caseback, which makes the case profile unbroken: a smooth titanium pebble, 42 mm across and 11 mm thick, on 20 mm lugs. Titanium also keeps the weight down, which matters with a case this broad.
What I like most is how the design deals with hierarchy. A conventional dial needs the hands to be the darkest, sharpest things on it, because they're the only moving parts. On the Type 1 everything moves, so the hierarchy has to come from size and placement instead. The minute disc is the big one, the hours, seconds and day sit on smaller discs within it, and you learn very quickly which mark belongs to which. It's an information design problem solved from first principles, which is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night in a good way.
It has faults, because everything does. The dial can be harder to read at an angle, and the discs' shallow depth means reflections from the crystal can mute them in bright light. The 36-hour reserve means it won't make it through a weekend. 50 m means don't swim in it. And 26,565 to 28,980 dollars is a very serious amount for a modified ETA base, though nobody buys this for the base.
Who should buy it: anyone with the money who's tired of looking at variations on the same dial. It's the most important piece of contemporary watch design I know of. Who shouldn't: anyone who needs other people to recognise what they're wearing.